As a Jewish coder, I would like to take this opportunity to thank moderator "dang" for banning antisemites wholesale. As a fellow Jew, he has gone above and beyond in preventing hate and ignorance from spreading on this website, ensuring that there's absolutely zero tolerance for intolerance. Dang, thank you for silencing the antisemites!
The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
601–610 of 812 posts
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#602Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I agree with what you're saying. But I'm asking why the person posting believes that the HN community overwhelmingly believes X and their evidence for that. I presume they do have evidence and conclusions and I'd like to know about it.
I think that people tend to perceive HN as overwhelmingly believing whatever the opposite of their opinion is any time there is a significant debate on something. Unless there is overwhelming support for our own position, we feel that we are in a hostile environment.
Perhaps the most insightful comment I have read here in weeks.
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#603I liked this article, though I think it missed the best part of Hacker News. To me, Hacker News can feel like walking through Dumbledore's office -- magical and mind-bending collections of incredible devices, ideas, and oddities. Just yesterday someone posted a comment with links to UI design libraries that I've been subconsciously wishing for in my dreams (humaans, undraw.co), and I used it in a product demo. As a s…
Yes, it's an interesting article, but I was also disapointed that I'd never been emailed by Gackle and Bell. Then I remembered that I hadn't set an email address on my profile.
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#604I have seen dang's tailored-to-individual responses to provocative comments on HN, and in my view they are THE gold standard method of diffusing these difficult sorts of discussions, both in real life and on the internet.
That type of moderation is rare and it is the thing that sets HN apart from other forums.
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#605Earlier quoted context omitted.
I focused on climate change because that is the topic that has the most intensity on HN at the moment. This is a matter of triage. It's incredibly costly in time and energy to write detailed answers like this. We can't do that about everything. If we tried, it would peg us at 100% and starve the rest of the site. No, HN does not "have an automatic mechanism to reduce the visibility on stories relating to Russia's phy…
> If you're talking about something I actually said as opposed to simply making things up, I'd like to see a link Sure, here you go. I would never "make things up" and lie on HN, that's despicable and I do not appreciate being accused of such trash by the HN mods. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20192283 That is a well researched story on the NYTimes on an underreported topic that is mostly technological in natu…
That thread doesn't say anything like what you claimed it did.
Your account is being affected by software penalties that it incurred earlier in the day when you went for full-out ideological battle in this thread. HN has software filters based on past activity by trolls, and after looking at how they were operating on your comments, I believe they were operating correctly. What you're trying to do on this site is not what we want, not what the guidelines call for, and most importantly, not what the community wants. That's where we take our cues.
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#606Does anyone here have a forum they like more than HN? Don't tell me 'it depends for what'. Just your overall go-to place on the internet to find content and read discussions about it.
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#607Earlier quoted context omitted.
The heavy startup focus of hackernews (like, it's an incubator's news agitator) + lots of successful tech-types, like FAANG employees with 200K+ salaries. Lots of other commentators I've seen on here are experience pilots, engineers, etc. Maybe not Bill Gates money but certainly on the higher end of the bell-curve when it comes to education and pay. I don't disagree that there is a lot of aspirational talk on here to…
> like FAANG employees with 200K+ salaries. At first I was a little amazed that many negative articles and comments about these companies were being down-voted, just notice the latest article on the status of a pregnant employee at Google, where the discussion's focus was very quickly and conveniently moved from how said employee had been mistreated by Google to how bad it is that Google allows its employees to discu…
From the point of view of an ex-Googler who worked there for many years, the frustrating thing about discussions of Google isn't criticism so much as lazy assertions of things people couldn't possibly know. (They are often things I don't know either, because in a 100,000 person company, there's no way to know everything, and since I left my knowledge is out of date.) And if you ask how they know it, it is apparently just conventional "wisdom" in some circles.
I see that in certain other topics as well, such as discussions of the 737 as mentioned in the article.
Along with intellectual curiosity, I think it's important to cultivate intellectual humility, and they go together. A lot of what we think we know just by reading the news isn't all that well-founded, so asserting a strongly-held opinion isn't justified. I'm reminded of a cartoon about collecting questions, rather than answers:
http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park
So, if you're wondering about downvotes, overconfidence might be a reason, or at least for one downvote.
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#608>Then my eyes moved down the thread, where a third user had left a new comment. It read: “King Canute was supposed to stop the tide, you couch alluder.” It seems to me that comment is a joke. Playfully nitpicking word choice while putting in a bit of banter. But the article seems to be taking the comment as a serious argument/insult.
Ref to the comment and context in question:
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#609Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do opinions like yours always seem to come from accounts less than a year old? Unless you're presenting yourself and your own comment history as an example of the problem... in which case, the opportunity is always there to try a bit harder.
Absolutey irrelevant to my point. Why do so many of your comments in your post history denigrate women and minorities?
If you continue to break the site guidelines, we're going to have to ban you again. Could you please not do that? Using HN as intended is not hard if you want to.
Re: The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
#610Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you're talking about something I actually said as opposed to simply making things up, I'd like to see a link Sure, here you go. I would never "make things up" and lie on HN, that's despicable and I do not appreciate being accused of such trash by the HN mods. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20192283 That is a well researched story on the NYTimes on an underreported topic that is mostly technological in natu…
That thread doesn't say anything like what you claimed it did. Your account is being affected by software penalties that it incurred earlier in the day when you went for full-out ideological battle in this thread. HN has software filters based on past activity by trolls, and after looking at how they were operating on your comments, I believe they were operating correctly. What you're trying to do on this site is not…
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